


The Key to a Good Marriage

by LectorEl



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: F/M, Janet isn't who she thinks she is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-09
Updated: 2013-09-09
Packaged: 2017-12-26 01:42:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/960100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LectorEl/pseuds/LectorEl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Janet, Jack, and the early days of their marriage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Key to a Good Marriage

Janet’s headaches were a relentless intrusion. Some days are better than others, some are much worse, but they are always a constant. They interrupt her sleep, and distract her from her work, and cut into her leisure time. She’d been going to different doctors for years, but no one has been able to do something about the problem. So Janet had learned to grit her teeth and endure, because she refused to spend half her life bedridden.

“How are you doing?” Jack asked, helping her out of the car.

She forced a thin smile. “Acceptably.” The pain was only a five, and the lighting inside the ballroom looked comfortably dim. Assuming the noise stayed low, she should be fine.

“If you need to leave, just say the word. I don’t care what my parents think,” Jack promised. He wrapped an arm around her waist. “I know this was only an arranged match, but I want to do right by you, Jan.”

Jack was a good man. She knew there was another he was in love with, but when his parents arranged the match with her own, he’d set that aside, and devoted himself to honoring their vows. His parents despised that. They’d expected Jack not to care for her, evidently, and to leave her to their ‘management.’

Instead, Jack has taken her side against them. He’s a romantic, who believed in the sacred nature of a wedding vow. Janet was more practical, but equally loyal. Her parents had little to do with her, and her few friends remain in New York. Jack was her only ally here in Gotham, and he has served her well.

“Let’s give them a show, shall we?” Janet asked, lips curving into a playful smile.

Jack laughed, an expression of open adoration coming to his face. “God, Jan, I’m so glad it was you. What’s the plan?”

“Just follow my lead.” Janet leaned her head on his shoulder, the very picture of a young woman in love. Manipulation wasn’t Janet’s natural talent. But to keep her, and her new husband, free of his parent’s influence, she’ll learn.

The ball went tolerably well. Janet managed to make her mother-in-law sputter several times, and the waiter she bribed managed to spill an entire tureen of soup over her father-in-law. The woman was fired on the spot, and Janet slipped her a card with the house phone number. Janet went to bed content.

In the morning, she woke up early, and lurched to the bathroom before gagging, coughing up thin stomach acid and not much else. That was the second time this week. A suspicion came over Janet. She grabbed her coat and head for the garage. One way to be sure.

Forty-five minutes, one trip to the nearest convenience store, and two pregnancy tests later, Janet had her answer.

 “I’m pregnant,” Janet told Jack, as soon as he came downstairs. She flared her hands over her flat belly, an inexplicable seed of panic rooting at the thought. Pregnant.

_-the baby, where was the baby, it was too soon, too soon, not yet-_

Jack’s enthusiasm was not so subdued. He hugged her impulsively, delight obvious. “Preg- that’s wonderful, Jan!”

“It is,” Janet agreed, shoving away her worries. A child of their own. A baby, hers and Jack’s. He’d have every advantage in the world. Janet would make sure of it.

- _Hush little baby, don’t you cry, daddy’s going to bring you the sky_ -

***

Seven months into her pregnancy, and Janet was a wreck. Her headaches have only gotten worse, and they’ve started to come with strange ideas, odd impulses that Janet did not understand. The world blurred and warped into something unrecognizable, and the woman in the mirror is a stranger.

She’s too polished, too put together. Elegantly inhuman, nothing but ice where warmth should be. She hasn’t become that, has she? Hasn’t gotten so cold it’s reached her core? Janet didn’t know that woman, didn’t recognize the room she stands in. It’s her house, but-

_-the wallpaper was peeling and the window looked out on a wall, but it’s theirs, hers and Jack’s and their little baby boy to be-_

-Janet felt like the now familiar walls of her house are a cage, her skin a dragging chain, and she can’t breathe.  Dark hair, short, cut to her chin, and it’s incorrect. It overwhelmed her, this sense of-

_-Jack sat beside her, stroking her hair, his expression one of bewildered wonder._

_“Do you think he’ll have your hair?” he asked, and she laughed, pulling her husband closer._

_“He’s going to have your hair, Jackie. Our baby boy is going to be so handsome.”-_

-dysphoria. It’s not her, it’s not her, not her face, not her hair, not her skin. There’s a stranger in the mirror, _it’s not her_. It’s a lie, a horrid falsehood, and Janet could feel herself disintegrating. She dug her hands into her hair, and pulled, ripping free ragged chunks of hair and bloodied scalp.

From behind her, there’s a shocked noise, and then hands are catching her own, forcing them away from her head. Janet thrashed wildly.

“Janet! Janet, it’s just me,” Jack said-

_-“Once the baby’s born, no more late nights, okay?” she asked sleepily, catching Jack’s hand and tugging him down onto their ratty mattress. “Baby’s going to need his daddy around.”_

_Jack kissed the side of her neck, snuggling up behind her. “No more late nights, Jeannie-love, I promise.”-_

-Janet laughed until her voice cracked, and then she sobbed, blood drying under her nails and dark hair scattered on the bathroom floor like the feathers of a dying bird.

“Jan, easy. Shh, easy,” Jack said, arms wrapped around her middle. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t-” her voice broke, and Janet swallowed, trying again, “I don’t _know_.”

“That’s okay, Jan.” Jack rocked them both, cradling Janet against his chest. “We’ll get through this. I promise. We’re going to be fine.”

They sat like that, on the bathroom floor, for a long time before Jack could coax her upright. Janet felt wrung out, drained. It was all she could do to follow Jack’s coaxing commands to change into fresh clothing, and follow him down the stairs. He pressed a mug of tea into her hands, and settled her on the couch, before retreating to the other room ‘to make a few calls.’

She listened to the conversations with vague, disinterested attention, only catching snatches of meaning.

“I don’t want to talk to you right now, mother,” Jack said, and Janet sat upright in her seat, jarred from her daze.

“It’s not your business. You’ve been perfectly beastly to Jan since the day I married her.” Janet could hear him pacing as he listened to whatever his mother said.

“Of course she’s my first priority, she’s my wife. I promised her that when I married her.”

“There’s been a minor complication with her pregnancy, and that’s all I’m telling you.”

Silence, followed by the sound of china shattering. Then-

“If you ever say such things about my wife again, I will kill you myself,” Jack said, his voice gone absolutely flat, and slammed the phone down hard enough the pictures on the wall rattled.

“That sounded interesting,” Janet said, laughing weakly.

“Thank god you’re lucid again.” Jack collapsed onto the couch beside her, tucking his face into the crook of her neck. “My mother is-fuck, Jan. I don’t even know where to begin.”

“What’d she do now?” Janet asked, rubbing his back. Jack hesitated, and Janet hit his shoulder lightly. “She’s been a terror since I met her, there’s not much she could do to shock me.”

“She outright said that she considered you a-” Jack looked up at her, and grimaced. “A, um, breeding mare. That they, uh. Purchased. And would replace if…”

“I failed to pop out a few healthy heirs to continue the family line?” Janet suggested, trying to keep her tone light. Rage started to boil in her stomach.

Jack nodded, not meeting her eyes. “I hadn’t- I never agreed to anything like that, Jan. I don’t even know what my parents are thinking. I don’t know what _your_ parents were thinking. Fuck. Goddamn. Hell. What do we do about this?”

“I vote hostile takeover,” Janet said, closing her eyes against the renewed ache behind her temples. “Hit them where it hurts.”

“Anything you want,” Jack promised. “I love you, Jan.”

And she hadn’t intended to say the words, hadn’t realized she’d meant them till they were said, but, “I love you too, Jack." 


End file.
